Nintendo Patches Out Same-Sex Marriage in Tomodachi Collection

[xPixelatedx]

Nintendo has always been anti-gay. I'm surprised they even let Link be as feminine as he is and Zelda to cross-dress as Shiek. But I guess Link always saves a dress wearing Zelda in the end so it's okay.

Have they? I've never seen anything from Nintendo particularly anti-gay, I mean Nintendo games tend to barely even touch on romance and relationships really further than the fairy tale style "hero saves princess" angle a lot of their games seem to have. I suppose they could be criticized for lacking openly gay characters in most of their games but sadly that's currently a given for most media aimed at children.

I don't think Nintendo is anti-gay, I just think they don't care either way. That is very Japaneses, as well. Gay stuff over there is seen more a novelty rather then something to get upset over, and either you like the novelty or you don't, it's really as simple as that. My friend moved there and he even told me 'black face' is still a thing there. They don't hate black people though, they just don't care either way.

If that place is really everything I'm told, I might move there one day. That excess mellow-ness sounds like a refreshing change to the 'bottled C4' that is western life.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Japan is very reserved about all public expressions of sexuality. They don't really have an equivalent to our fundamentalist homophobes, but neither do they have many respected gay rights activist. So it's going to take a long time, because no one wants to talk about it for the first time.

They are hostile against many of the acts and self-identifications that westerners regard as basic freedoms, but even that has more to do with a general "The stake that sticks out gets hammered down" attitude, than particularly picking on gays.

This.

Actually, fun fact, this is why anime and manga tend to have far more positive deceptions of gay characters than their western counterparts, but at the same time why Nintendo is eliminating it from the game - because it is okay to be gay in Japan, but not to talk about it.

Also, because characters in fiction are often portrayed as individuals even while Japanese society hates individuality.

Finally, this also means that many of the above mentioned portrayals of homosexual characters in anime and manga tend to lean towards (Japanese) stereotypes - because many of the creators have never actually met an out gay person.

 

[cookyy2k]

Well Nintendo just opened Pandora's box on themselves. If this bug hadn't occurred no one would have give a flying f*** if the game allows same-sex marriage, not it has been unintentionally allowed then removed by the fix the community will be all over them. I find it funny when something like this happens that people take it as a personal insult, it was a bug, it got patched.

capacha: Pandora's box... see it agrees, and is spookily prophetic since I didn't read it til now.

 

[Olas]

So you're telling me the people responsible for this:

Are a bunch of homophobes?
Ya, of course, why didn't I see it before?

 

[Raine_sage]

That's a hell of a difference that you refuse to acknowledge.

But hey, I doubt I can change your mind. Just know that, while there definitely is malice, it's not as common as you seem to think.

Because while you have seen malice, I have also seen (and performed) incredibly offensive actions that weren't remotely intended to be so.

The problem with "I don't intend to be malicious" is that it's a scapegoat to keep on performing the same offensive/ignorant actions and evade the responsibility of making restitutions or even owning up to what they did.

And no, I still don't think that Nintendo, of all companies, is malicious.

That's cool, we don't have to think the same.

It's not about evading responsibilty so much though as helping you decide which course of action to take when confronted with someone being ignorant.
Like, if you get a fact wrong in conversation with someone completely on accident, and they go off on you like you just shot their baby even though a "hey dude sorry but it's not like that" would have sufficed, are you going to lend more or less weight to their argument? I've committed offense really without meaning too and had people tell me so in a variety of different ways. I'm definitely more willing to listen to someone who treats me like an intelligent adult who made a faux paw, than someone who screams at me about how I "should have known better" no matter how many times I try to apologize.

Likewise Nintendo sells products to Americans/Europe/Wherever else but it's still a Japanese company and in Japan Gay Rights as we know them here don't exist. Women's rights has only recently become a thing. Pretty much any movement that centers around individuality never picked up much traction there because Japanese culture emphasizes the family over the individual. Has this led to some less than ideal conditions for minorities? Of course. But calling their entire cultural viewpoint malicious wouldn't get you anywhere with someone if you were trying to communicate to them /why/ it's a bad thing. Sorry for rambling but I just think a little empathy and an understanding that people fuck up sometimes without meaning too goes a long way towards fostering understanding between groups.

 

[Darken12]

Sorry for rambling but I just think a little empathy and an understanding that people fuck up sometimes without meaning too goes a long way towards fostering understanding between groups.

I understand that. I understand everything you say. I merely resent being told how I should feel (or how forgiving I should be). I want to be angry at this. Let me be angry at this. Thank you.

 

[theultimateend]

Again, that could take days, depending on how messy the code is (and believe me, code can get unbelievably messy).

Also, I think you're being paranoid. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, and this is definitely a case where they could have simply not thought of what their actions were implying.

I literally hate Hanlon's Razor with the stabbing fury of a thousand slashers. No. It's not all innocent stupidity. There is malice in the world, and I know because I have seen it. I refuse to accept "oopsie daisy, we're all just harmless bumbling fools, tee hee!" as a valid excuse. No. At the end of the day, I do not care if it's stupidity or malice. It makes absolutely no difference to me, and I heavily resent the implication that I'm supposed to excuse or forgive or change how I feel because someone did something I highly disapprove of out of stupidity instead of malice.

Do...

Do you have a job?

I only ask because 90% of the time our management is trying to do A and ends up accidentally also causing B.

B can sometimes be an unintended message and other times B can be an actual change to game design that results in people thinking it was intentional.

Your issue is mean-worth theory, basically for you the world is much harsher than it actually is. There are >a lot< of nasty people in the world but that's just a raw number. The actual % of people in the world that are 'evil' is quite small. It's large enough to be noticeable and inconvenient to life. So in that respect I do agree it should be addressed.

The odds that this update was done because of homophobia is incredibly slim. I imagine if people bring up the change and mention the message it sends the developers will change it or earnestly apologize.

You won't believe them, but it won't make it untrue.

The problem with "I don't intend to be malicious" is that it's a scapegoat to keep on performing the same offensive/ignorant actions and evade the responsibility of making restitutions or even owning up to what they did.

The Reddit argument.

"Oh I see! Reddit White Knights against misogyny and then now this post about tits is on the front page! Hypocrites!"

Different people are different people. Observing that some people lie does not mean all other people lie.

It's generally obvious when people are using a scapegoat to get out of trouble. It's not a very subtle thing.

Just like on Reddit some people like X and other people on Reddit like -X.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Sometimes, we forgot we're past the first decade of the XXI century...

 

[Darken12]

*snip*

And yet my viewpoints are my prerogative. We are all constantly making assumptions and decisions based on available evidence. We all have our systems for doing so. I haven't criticised yours (you can believe in the goodwill of Nintendo and the rest of the world as much as you want), so kindly refrain from doing the same with me.

But why? Nintendo are patching a bug that comes with game-breaking issues, as well as allowing male characters to get pregnant.

If this was a Bethesda game, we'd be calling on them to patch it ASAP. Now that it's Nintendo, why are you trying to turn it into this huge thing?

I don't care if it's Nintendo. I would be expressing my distaste of any company who pulled something like this. I am not buying the "we're just patching a bug!" excuse. If you want to fix a bug, you fix the bug.

Also, I am not making anything into a "huge thing", I am doing what everyone else is doing: sharing my opinions on this matter. I did not go around quoting people and starting arguments. I expressed my opinions and people latched onto that because goodness forfend I express a divergent opinion.

 

[EstrogenicMuscle]

I think that Nintendo prefers to avoid anything that might have a controversial meaning to anyone.

Despite the fact that Christians would like most Christian references in Nintendo games, they explicitly removed all references to Christianity in Nintendo games. Somehow I get the feeling conservative American Christians would have gotten a kick out of Link holding up a book with a cross on it rather than offended.

Though Nintendo will probably shy away from gay depictions of fictional characters until it becomes mainstream enough for them to see it as a profitable and safe thing to do. Nintendo doesn't really have an opinion on this sort of thing.

You don't see too many gay characters from Nintendo. Though you do see a lot of crossdressers and characters who seem in some way transgender. Or other characters who blur gender lines of some sort. For instance, Vivian from Paper Mario.

 

[Schadrach]

I am pretty sure that changing one line of dialogue from "we're pregnant!" to "we're adopting!" would have been a lot simpler than preventing the marriages altogether. They can't even claim simplicity or laziness on this one, because the lazy option was, coincidentally, the most progressive.

Except that the "mother" actually gets depicted as pregnant. So, it's not changing one line of dialog, it's also figuring out some reasoning behind why whenever a gay couple decides to adopt, one of them gets really fat for a while. =p

I find it hard to believe that people who wanted to avoid showing mpreg in a game went out of their way to depict mpreg in the in-game models.

Not to mention that if that was the bug they wanted to correct, that should have been the bug they corrected.

Likely there's either a "preg" piece that gets attached to existing models or a standard deformation applied to the model to apply "preg." IOW, there's like not special mpreg models.

Not a coder, are you? I can tell from the fact that you think "add a check that keeps men from being marked as a 'wife' which bars gay marriage but blocks actual problems too" and "add a mechanism for events to verify the gender of people instead of assuming they were put in standard 'husband' and 'wife' slots then check and potentially rewrite every event to utilize the new conditions and be sure that that didn't break anything in some other obscure corner case" are even remotely similar amounts of effort.

 

[Sticky]

*snip*

I don't care if it's Nintendo. I would be expressing my distaste of any company who pulled something like this. I am not buying the "we're just patching a bug!" excuse. If you want to fix a bug, you fix the bug.

But they fixed a bug, that's why we're having this conversation in the first place.

Think of this from the perspective of the people who fixed the bug:

When a game gets finished and bugs are found later, they do the natural thing they are contracted to do and apply patches. They don't add features, they don't add extra content to the game, because all that content is stuff that has to be tested as well. It's stuff that requires it's own prerogative to test and merge into the core game.

Adding features costs money, what may be just "leave the bug in!" to you is instead "contract a whole new team to add in this feature and test it against the stable code-base". Because the original team doesn't exist in whole anymore, they have already been shuffled off to a new project.

Even if this just was a text bubble malfunction, the crew who was left behind to fix bugs have no choice but to fix the bugs they were given. I doubt that programmer who fixed this was really going to put his job on the line over a bug. No one should have to.

Please don't act like this is the result of an evil bigoted programmer trying to crush gay rights, this is probably just a guy trying to keep his job.

Sometimes, we forgot we're past the first decade of the XXI century...

Yeah, evil Nintendo doing it's job. What an awful collection of bigots that Nintendo.

 

[Darken12]

*snip*

As I have repeatedly stated in this thread, I genuinely do not care if Nintendo did it on purpose or if they're just incompetent and unaware of how shitty their bug-fixing method is. The outcome is the same either way.

*snip*

Regardless of whether it's harder or easier to do this or that, the outcome is the same.

 

[Sticky]

*snip*

As I have repeatedly stated in this thread, I genuinely do not care if Nintendo did it on purpose or if they're just incompetent and unaware of how shitty their bug-fixing method is. The outcome is the same either way.

On the contrary, their bug-fixing method is actually extremely efficient because the bug doesn't exist anymore.

That's the one little factoid you seem to be missing.

Regardless of whether it's harder or easier to do this or that, the outcome is the same.

This is why I don't like threads that devolve into programmers vs non-programmers. Easier is by definition better as a decision for the person who made this change.

One of the reasons I'm so bitterly against outrage against programmers is because at the end of the day, they're just doing their job. It was this persons job to fix a bug, and he did it.

 

[Darken12]

On the contrary, their bug-fixing method is actually extremely efficient because the bug doesn't exist anymore.

That's the one little factoid you seem to be missing.

Right, right. Because if we take, say, WoW, and they receive a bug report about a certain ledge in an area which a player can jump from in order to bypass invisible walls, the perfect bug-fixing method is to make the entire area unavailable! Of course! Now that's some sound, intelligent bug-fixing.

You know what method has 100% efficiency in solving every single bug ever? Shutting down the entire game so that nobody can play it.

EDIT:

This is why I don't like threads that devolve into programmers vs non-programmers. Easier is by definition better as a decision for the person who made this change.

One of the reasons I'm so bitterly against outrage against programmers is because at the end of the day, they're just doing their job. It was this persons job to fix a bug, and he did it.

He fixed the bug by removing something that mirrors real-world bigotry, thereby (inadvertently, if we're feeling generous) mirroring real-world bigotry. This is like having a faulty polygon in one of the darker skin tones and saying that the way to fix it is to prevent players from creating darker-skin characters. Or having a glitch when female models enter a certain area, so the bug fixing is to prevent female players from entering that area. Or from leaving the kitchen.

It's not good bug-fixing, and I have no sympathy for whoever did this.

 

[Sticky]

On the contrary, their bug-fixing method is actually extremely efficient because the bug doesn't exist anymore.

That's the one little factoid you seem to be missing.

Right, right. Because if we take, say, WoW, and they receive a bug report about a certain ledge in an area which a player can jump from in order to bypass invisible walls, the perfect bug-fixing method is to make the entire area unavailable! Of course! Now that's some sound, intelligent bug-fixing.

You know what method has 100% efficiency in solving every single bug ever? Shutting down the entire game so that nobody can play it.

Once again, proving why I don't like having these programmer vs non-programmer arguments.

I'm sure Nintendo's actual solution was really to cause every Wii in the world to explode so they never have to see the evils of gay marriage. I'm also sure their original goal was to make the game completely unplayable like you're suggesting that they have done instead of fixing a bug to ensure that the game remained playable.

Or you know, maybe their actual solution was following typical QA guidelines, receiving a bug report, fixing a bug, and then closing that bug report.

A far cry from what you think they have done, which is completely destroy the game and any value it may have because they made a business decision that you don't agree with. Really I think you're just too emotionally invested in this particular argument.

He fixed the bug by removing something that mirrors real-world bigotry, thereby (inadvertently, if we're feeling generous) mirroring real-world bigotry. This is like having a faulty polygon in one of the darker skin tones and saying that the way to fix it is to prevent players from creating darker-skin characters. Or having a glitch when female models enter a certain area, so the bug fixing is to prevent female players from entering that area. Or from leaving the kitchen.

It's not good bug-fixing, and I have no sympathy for whoever did this.

Do you really not see the huge logical gap in your argument? Let me magnify it a bit for you

He fixed the bug ...
It's not good bug-fixing

The politics of it are irrelevant. That's up to the company to decide. The team in charge of maintaining the game only handles logical values.

 

[Darken12]

A far cry from what you think they have done, which is completely destroy the game and any value it may have because they made a business decision that you don't agree with. Really I think you're just too emotionally invested in this particular argument.

I see sarcasm is lost in you.

No, I do not think that this bug-fixing has destroyed the game. That was an exaggeration of your "meh, I'll just stop the players from being able to access the bug instead of actually fixing it" mentality, taken to its logical extreme. Stopping a player from accessing a bug is not good bug-fixing, much less when doing so mirrors real-life bigotry.

The politics of it are irrelevant.

The politics are literally the only thing that is relevant about all this, at least to me. I could not care less about the whys and hows of this. The only thing I care about is the fact that this sloppy, lazy "bug-fixing" has ended up mirroring (and, in an indirect way, supporting) real-life bigotry.

 

[Sticky]

Stopping a player from accessing a bug is not good bug-fixing, much less when doing so mirrors real-life bigotry.

Thank god there's no real programmers that think like you do. Segmentation faults and stack collisions everywhere.

Of course they would probably be very happy if customers thought this way, it would make their job a lot easier to just release buggy, broken products and then just saying "I'm sorry, we didn't fix these bugs because someone on our team found one of the bugs to be morally endearing". Where do you even work that you think that finding a problem and solving it is bad practice? Certainly not anything technical.

The politics are literally the only thing that is relevant about all this, at least to me. I could not care less about the whys and hows of this. The only thing I care about is the fact that this sloppy, lazy "bug-fixing" has ended up mirroring (and, in an indirect way, supporting) real-life bigotry.

When you program anything your care is in function. Everything else comes second. Everything else HAS to come second because computers aren't programmed using the powers of good feelings and positive inclusiveness. They're programmed by hard, logical facts about how that program should and shouldn't function. When someone makes a logical oversight, that can cause problems in a world that is based on 100% logical facts existing.

You saying "BUT IT'S BIGOTRY!" wouldn't actually fix the bug and doesn't add anything to the conversation. Because the game doesn't care about how you feel about it, it only cares about the logical facts that are put inside of it.

Once again, if you wanted to add a whole new set of logical facts that tell it that gay marriage is okay, that would require breaking down the game and adding in all those new laws of the universe that the game was completely unaware of beforehand. Like that two men can't get pregnant, or that marriage doesn't require an opposite gender slot.

Want that to happen? Petition Nintendo. Don't blame a mere coder and/or QA person whose mere job is to fix logical problems with how the game is currently defined.

 

[Darken12]

Want that to happen? Petition Nintendo. Don't blame a mere coder and/or QA person whose mere job is to fix logical problems with how the game is currently defined.

False dichotomy. Implies there is no possibility of fixing a bug without that kind of undesirable results. There is. Don't paint the programmers as tragic victims who had no other choice but to do this. There were other ways of accomplishing their goals. They just did not care.